CUNY Academic Commons

BuddyPress automatically auto-links certain things in one's profile fields. In practice, this means that (a) very short entries (like "English") get linked, and (b) items that look like they're part of a list ("I like <grapes>, <bananas>, <ice cream>"). The purpose of this feature is to promote serendipitous discovery of people with shared interests. We also have a custom feature on the Commons that lets people override the default auto-links by putting words/phrases in [square brackets].

A user has expressed http://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/2830 that this auto-linking is confusing. It's possible to disable it by putting '[]' in the field (overriding the default links without actually adding any of your own), but this is not transparent. The current ticket is to discuss ways to improve this experience, either by changing the feature or by improving the documentation.

Chris, I'm tentatively assigning to you to get your thoughts.